Related papers: Nature's All-in-One: Multitasking Robots Inspired …
Walking animals, like stick insects, cockroaches or ants, demonstrate a fascinating range of locomotive abilities and complex behaviors. The locomotive behaviors can consist of a variety of walking patterns along with adaptation that allow…
The feet of robots are typically used to design locomotion strategies, such as balancing, walking, and running. However, they also have great potential to perform manipulation tasks. In this paper, we propose a model predictive control…
Robot controllers are often optimised for a single robot in a single environment. This approach proves brittle, as such a controller will often fail to produce sensible behavior for a new morphology or environment. In comparison, animal…
Legged robots have significant potential to operate in highly unstructured environments. The design of locomotion control is, however, still challenging. Currently, controllers must be either manually designed for specific robots and tasks,…
Most legged robots are built with leg structures from serially mounted links and actuators and are controlled through complex controllers and sensor feedback. In comparison, animals developed multi-segment legs, mechanical coupling between…
Animals use limbs for both locomotion and manipulation. We aim to equip quadruped robots with similar versatility. This work introduces a system that enables quadruped robots to interact with objects using their legs, inspired by…
While most insect-inspired robots come with a simple tarsus such as a hemispherical foot tip, insect legs have complex tarsal structures and claws, which enable them to walk on complex terrain. Their sharp claws can smoothly attach and…
Legged robots have the potential to become vital in maintenance, home support, and exploration scenarios. In order to interact with and manipulate their environments, most legged robots are equipped with a dedicated robot arm, which means…
Robotics would gain by replicating the remarkable agility of arthropods in navigating complex environments. Here we consider the control of multi-legged systems which have 6 or more legs. Current multi-legged control strategies in robots…
Robots excel at avoiding obstacles but struggle to traverse complex 3-D terrain with cluttered large obstacles. By contrast, insects like cockroaches excel at doing so. Recent research in our lab elucidated how locomotor transitions emerge…
The remarkable athletic intelligence displayed by humans in complex dynamic movements such as dancing and gymnastics suggests that the balance mechanism in biological beings is decoupled from specific movement patterns. This decoupling…
Limbless locomotors, from microscopic worms to macroscopic snakes, traverse complex, heterogeneous natural environments typically using undulatory body wave propagation. Theoretical and robophysical models typically emphasize body…
Learning a locomotion policy for quadruped robots has traditionally been constrained to a specific robot morphology, mass, and size. The learning process must usually be repeated for every new robot, where hyperparameters and reward…
Legged robots must adapt their gait to navigate unpredictable environments, a challenge that animals master with ease. However, most deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches to quadruped locomotion rely on a fixed gait, limiting…
This paper addresses the challenge of terrain-adaptive dynamic locomotion in humanoid robots, a problem traditionally tackled by optimization-based methods or reinforcement learning (RL). Optimization-based methods, such as model-predictive…
Robots are becoming increasingly essential for traversing complex environments such as disaster areas, extraterrestrial terrains, and marine environments. Yet, their potential is often limited by mobility and adaptability constraints. In…
Agile-legged robots have proven to be highly effective in navigating and performing tasks in complex and challenging environments, including disaster zones and industrial settings. However, these applications normally require the capability…
Animals possess a remarkable ability to navigate challenging terrains, achieved through the interplay of various pathways between the brain, central pattern generators (CPGs) in the spinal cord, and musculoskeletal system. Traditional…
Modular robots can be rearranged into a new design, perhaps each day, to handle a wide variety of tasks by forming a customized robot for each new task. However, reconfiguring just the mechanism is not sufficient: each design also requires…
While quadruped robots usually have good stability and load capacity, bipedal robots offer a higher level of flexibility / adaptability to different tasks and environments. A multi-modal legged robot can take the best of both worlds. In…